Russell Taylor

Introduction This Intermediate 1 level Unit is about Programming in High-level Languages In this Unit you will: Identify the requirements for creating a computer program (Closed Book) Identify the various components used in constructing computer programs (Closed Book) Use structured techniques in program design (Closed Book) Create a software program for a given problem (Open Book)

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How is Language Useful? Our most fundamental tool as intelligent beings is language. It is through language that you learn new information and share your knowledge, feelings, and experiences with others. Through language, you can express any thought anyone has ever had and describe any event, real or fictional. The world is controlled through language. Presidents to petty functionaries, Generals to Privates, Managing Directors to clerks — all rely on language to give instructions to others and to gather information.

Computer Languages Language is a necessity for a computer, too. Software is created using special languages that provide instructions for telling the computer what to do. And language defines the data with which the instructions will work. Computer language is similar to human language in many ways. The nouns, verbs, prepositions, and objects found in English, for example, have their counterparts in programming code—or the source code, the actual lines of text that get translated into functioning programs. But software sentences have their own syntax, and the words that make up the languages have their own precise meanings.

Computer Languages are Limited Computer language is more exacting and more limited than English. An often-repeated story tells how, in an early attempt to use a computer to translate English into Russian, the phrase “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” was interpreted as “The vodka is ready, but the meat is rotten.” The story might be mythical, but it illustrates a reality—that computers and their languages do not do a good job of managing the ambiguities and shades of meaning in human language that any four-year-old understands (although recent advances in voice recognition have computers understanding what we say, if not what we mean)

Computer Language Precision If programming languages lack the subtleties of human language, human language cannot match the precision of computer-speak. Try, for example, to describe a simple spiral without using your hands. It is impossible in English.

Maths and Computer Language But because mathematics is an integral part of computer languages, those languages cannot only describe a spiral but also can provide the instructions to create an image of that spiral on a monitor or printer.